Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On 20 Jan 2015, at 12:31 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: All I know about is ideas and ideas are information and I would say that information is physical, but you would call it abstract and non-physical, in contrast I can say virtually nothing about the sun itself but you would say that was physical and non-abstract. John K Clark Maybe stop using that ridiculous and meaningless art term abstract. You sound like an eighth grader stuggling to understand Modigliani. Nothing is abstract. Even Modigliani. Things either exist or they don't. If it can be called anything at all then it exists. It can exist wherever the hell it wants; I don't call something abstract just because I cannot see it. The funny part is that by calling it abstract you merely affirm it's (non-physical) existence for you, which is all we want you to be able to do without wetting yourself. The issue of whether it is physical or not can never be resolved either - especially given the eternal warfare waged over the very meaning of terms like physical, existence, matter etc. Whether something is physical or not is immaterial, excuse the pun. We just want to know if it's real. For some people, numbers are more real than anything else. I don't think they should be committed to an asylum for that belief. What numbers actually are cannot be known, only guessed at. Kim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On 20 Jan 2015, at 02:31, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 10:17 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The question is not if God exists or not. But if God = the physical universe? God = a mathematical structure? Which one? God = a dream by a universal machine? God = a sum on all dreams by all universal machines? God = the one who lost itself in a labyrinth of dreams? God = the one who plays hide and seek with Itself? God = the universal person? God = the universal person completions? (if that exists) God = Allah? God = Jesus? God = Krishna? God = my tax collector? God = the one who made the cat in its own image, and then made the humans to gives the vat the modern comfort, with TV nad bag of catnip? etc. If you're correct about that, and I think you are, and it could mean a tax collector or the mathematical universe or anything in between then the word God has exactly ZERO information content and writing about God accomplishes nothing except cause excessive wear and tear on the O D and G keys on your computer. And yet some people still insist on using the word. Go figure. That would be the case if God was defined by the disjunction above. You wrote that disjunction not me. But God was defined by roots of the physical, psychological and spiritual reality. That certainly is NOT the definition of God used by people who carve statues, or perform sacrifices or say prayers or built churches or mosques or temples. I very much doubt that the person who carved the Venus of Willendorf in 3 BC or the Venus of Hohle Fels in 4 BC was thinking about the roots of the physical, psychological and spiritual reality; I believe all these people were thinking about a *PERSON* who is vastly more powerful than themselves who can get things done for them it you ask that *PERSON* in just the right way. I use God in the sense of the platonist, who introduced the field of inquiry theology. It is explained in Plato's Parmenides, and is the base of the so called Neoplatonism. It can be related with the god of the philosophers. it generalize the sense of the fairy tales God, with the fairy tale and superstition threw away, as we do when we do science. In all case God is by definition the origin of things. Science always simplifies maximally the notion, to ease the proof. And I still don't understand what you mean by spiritual reality and physical reality and the examples you gave don't have any logical consistency as far as I can tell. ? It is not clear if mathematics is the root of physics or physics is the root of mathematics. Because you stop at step 3. You would be able to understand that computationalism makes physical reality an aspect of the arithmetical reality. That is the point of the UDA, which you pretend having refutated, but nobody has been able to understand your argument. I know for a fact that the idea of the sun exists and I can tell you lots of specific things about the idea of the sun, and use those ideas to generate yet more ideas about the sun, that seems pretty down to earth concrete and physical to me. Concrete? You said abstract the other day. You describe the aristotelian intuition, but with computationalism and quantum mechanics, we are lead to question this intuition. All I know about is ideas and ideas are information and I would say that information is physical, but you would call it abstract and non- physical, in contrast I can say virtually nothing about the sun itself but you would say that was physical and non-abstract. I use the terms in the common sense. Physics is about predicting measurable numbers, in a 3p or 1p-plural way. It involves sharable measuring apparatus. Mathematics is about mathematical objects, like numbers and functions, with or without applications a priori to the physical reality or the observable. The theory of everything is Robinson Arithmetic (RA). It does not assume any physical things, and explains exactly what physics is. Bruno PS I have to go, and will answer other posts this evening, or tomorrow. John K Clark l -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at
Re: The Weakness of Panpsychism?
On 20 January 2015 at 05:42, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: What would that mean? If neuroscientists of the future develop brain monitoring instrumentation and software such that they scan watch processes in your brain and then say correctly, You were seeing red and it reminded you of a dress your late grandmother wore and made you sad. would you accept that as entirely observable? Well, I would of course accept that what had been observed was entirely observable! It would mean that the public component of the public-private 'entanglement' - the pattern of neurological activity correlated with specific conscious states - had indeed been brought under observation. But I wouldn't thereby be forced to accept that the neuroscientists had direct access to my private state of mind in the same sense as I do myself. The relevant distinction is that between the result of observation, on the one hand, and the mode of observation, on the other. The latter entails two 'entangled' components, of which only one can be made 'public'. Despite its absence from the public sphere, the private part cannot in fact be disregarded in any consideration of 'observation' since it is an ineliminable component of the observers' own mode of observation! David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Free Speech is not Free unless it is allowed for every point of view
Forget ball games. I wager that when the jihadists strike here in either a series of small attacks or another 911, your side, for coddling the jihadists will be held to account. And, sadly, people will say, At least under Bush we felt safe. -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jan 19, 2015 7:21 pm Subject: Re: Free Speech is not Free unless it is allowed for every point of view From: spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com Hmmm! Then you have wasted your companie's, valuable time bantering with someone you don't like and can't control? Some software schmuck, you must be. Where are your ethics, man? Oh, wait, I take that back, for most progressives do not possess this attribute, only the hunger to control. Well, mah trailer needs propane re-fuelin' and I gotta git down to thuh liquer store before mama june kills me. Wee dawgies! Now yew git on and a keep a cod'in and developin' whatever that is? P.S, the seahawks suck and the pats will roll over yer candy asses. What do yew and the Pats have in common? Ansdwer: Deflated balls. Bwah hah hah hah! Even Mama June bust out laffin at that wun. Why would my company care if I take a few minutes here and there during the day? It knows -- from working deployed, low defect, high performant software -- that it gets excellent value from my services, which is why it continues to have me (and others like me) fulfill them. This is also why the globally preeminent technology companies I work for DO NOT -- AND WILL NEVER -- higher incompetent angry windbags like you... who have an overblown sense of their own entitlement coupled with a lack of any valuable real skills. You have nothing of any value to exchange; your labor is just not worth very much to them. P.S. The Seahawks won the game and are going to the Super Bowl. Spectacular last five minutes and over time play on that game. But... Hey there goober, isn't it time for you to mosey on down to see if your (government) check is in the mail box (delivered to you by our socialist mail service). -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jan 19, 2015 6:35 pm Subject: Fw: Free Speech is not Free unless it is allowed for every point of view - Forwarded Message - From: spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com Nupe. Basically you are explaining away the election losses and the endless trail of middle class taxpayer dollars, to the blue state governments, their government unions, and the underclass, who is content with Mexican billionaire and Obola contributor, Carlos Slim Helu's cheapo chump trak phones, welfare checks, food stamps, ghettos, hoods, and barrios. What has changed is that from a political studies pov, enough of the demographic of the white middle and working classes, who want to work (unlike your crack and meth head friends), realize they have gotten burned bad, by a political class that is neither interested in their financial well being, nor their physical safety, from your Islamic State sympathizers, like yourself. I see a time, fairly soon, when a plurality of American residents, whether legally here or not will say to themselves, at least under Bushie I felt safe! I probably care for the Bushes in US politics on a scale somewhat less then yourself (hard to say since your progie derangement must make cognitive thinking difficult at best for you), but based on what is happening overseas, this day will arrive. Keep on strumming your guitar dude, its supposedly therapeutic. Don't have the time (nor the desire) to respond to your delusional oxycontin fueled rant in detail -- because like most progressives -- I am at work, earning money for my family to live on. Not all of us can be Tea Party welfare queens. -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jan 19, 2015 3:50 pm Subject: Re: Free Speech is not Free unless it is allowed for every point of view Anyone can look up the facts (over the last few election cycles). If you add up all Blue states in one column and all red states in another column the blue column of states turns out to be a net contributor to the federal revenue; the red states are net recipients of federal tax dollars. Such simple mathematical averaging may be beyond your Tea Party math skills however; so I can recognize why you are struggling with this... as with so many concepts that require some actual thinking. This pattern also holds when you do more micro analysis at the zipcode level. The net result is that
Re: Why was nobody murdered because of this cartoon?
France has been known for its deliberate hatreds, pre-ww2, and post ww2. Having said this what I think is occurring is counter colonization, and as of late decades, deliberate. The imposition is from Islamic lands where the majority of the Uma, crave sharia law, sharia rule. I had pondered in years before that maybe this is karma for the French for their personal nastiness? In this case the lesser of the two evils right now are the jihadists, rather then the national front. On what to do, is another matter, perhaps best left off this forum? Dieudonné, their national treasure, as you term it, is a stage name, for a Muslim fellow, who carries his jihad to his shows. The Algerian war you write of are unquestionable in that the Pied Noire colonists were basically the same folks who followed Martial Petain and Pierre Laval collabiorators, during WW2. Again we have a case of the bad versus the worse. -Original Message- From: chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jan 19, 2015 7:49 pm Subject: RE: Why was nobody murdered because of this cartoon? Maybe the Onion cartoon didn't set anyone off, but it just isn't true that these three Algerians are the only people who behave psychotically in the face of free speech. During the first salvos of the battle of Fallujah the allies ransacked and shut down the general hospital because it was releasing civilian casualty figures. That was a war crime. The allies bombed the offices of Al Jazeera in Bagdahd in 2003, a fact widely denied until David Blunket boasted about it in his memoirs. Why? They were releasing civilian casualty figures alongside photographic proof. Freely reporting the truth is simply unacceptable. In the war against Serbia Nato bombed Serbian state tv head quarters killing scores of journalists. We shouldn't be fooled into thinking France has any regard for free speech either. Only days after the Hebdo attacks their national treasure Dieudonné was arrested for an offensive face book post. He aligned himself with the killers rather than the victims in an exasperated outburst. It was deeply insensitive and deeply offensive. But so what? It was just a joke. Clarke's question isn't a fair one. A fair question would be to ask why these three men turned psychotic over a cartoon. Asking why muslims are the only group to turn psychotic implies muslims turn psychotic over jokes in general, which isnt true. It implies that the only people who have killed journalists have been muslims. Again not true. Why did these three Algerians turn psychotic? Who can honestly say? But we can look at the history of Algeria and France, and as it turns out the conquest and subjugation of the Algerian people was exceptionally brutal. Here is a postcard French ex-pats in Algeria could send home to mom depicting the fate of Algerian nationals who disobeyed: http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/1337/5sor.jpg see, even beheading people and publishing it on public media has precedents in the west. The Algerians tried to get their country back triggering a bitter civil war that killed 1.5 million people and resulted in Algerian society being torn apart. Pro French Algericans escaped to france, where they have been treated like animals ever since. In 1961, in Paris, during a peaceful protest against the occupation of Algeria and against a curfew imposed by the state, the french police rounded up scores of Algerian men women and children, beat them unconscious and threw them into the Seine to drown. Thousands were rounded up into stadiums and beaten. There are reports that some were forced to drink bleach. Corpses washed up on the shores of the Seine for weeks. Upwards of 200 people were killed. Some estimates are far higher. France. Its not all cheese, baguettes and ooh la la. Since 1961 muslims have been subjected to increasingly draconian restrictions on their freedome and a media that depicts them in as dehumanizing way as possible. The wankers at Charlie Hebdo are part of that. Of course they should be free to do it, but its no wonder this marginalized sector feels angry about it. The media now presents the story as though white french people should be afraid of Algerians. Historically, its clearly the other way around because the whites in France have been behaving like a brutal and murderous bunch of cunts. That said, these three Algerians probably did what they did without reference to any of that and because of some words in a book. To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Why was nobody murdered because of this cartoon? From: everything-list@googlegroups.com Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 18:45:13 -0500 Brent, you are suffering from progressive derangement syndrome, where all non-complaint minds are evil Nazis. I will never be compliant with progressive thinking because, a) it works poorly, and b) its totalitarian in nature, and becomes
Re: Manifesto Rex
Hi Rex, Interesting read. I will just start with something I've been thinking about, along these lines (I believe). It is interesting that there are a number of models of reality that are prima facie as plausible as any other but are more consistently rejected as lunacy, woo, new-age-mambo-jambo, etc. These models tend to have something in common: they suggest that we are not what we appear to be, that we are not mortal or immortal because time itself is a dream. That there is only one consciousness and we are all fundamentally the same entity, from the amoeba on. Quantum immortality. This sort of thing. They start with consciousness as the brute fact, as you posit. I have no intellectual reason to reject such ideas, but I definitely feel a resistance to them. So it also occurred to me that believing in such things appears maladaptive. Intuitively, such beliefs may lead you to be less preoccupied with survival and reproduction. So it's not so surprising that we evolved to reject such ideas but this leads to a terrible doubt: can we trust ourselves to do science? Another distasteful speculation: maybe there's *survival instinct* behind nerds and geeks being bullied. A more optimistic take: maybe real science is a possibility for the future, if we transcend Darwinism. Cheers Telmo. On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Rex Allen rexallen31...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness precedes axioms. Consciousness precedes logic. Axioms and logic exist within conscious experience - not vice versa. Consciousness comes before everything else. It is self-evident that there are conscious experiences. However, what consciousness *is* - it’s ultimate nature - is not self-evident. Further, what any particular conscious experience “means” is also not self-evident. For example: The experience of color is directly known and incontrovertible. But what the experience of color *means* is not directly known - any proposed explanation is inferential and controvertible. We do not have direct access to meaning. We only have direct access to bare uninterpreted conscious experience. So - any attempted explanation of consciousness from the outside (i.e., objectively) must be constructed from inside consciousness, by conscious processes, on a foundation of conscious experience. Not a promising situation - because any explanation must be based entirely on conscious experiences which have no intrinsic meaning, and arrived at via conscious processes which are equally lacking in intrinsic meaning. It “seems” like we could just stop here and accept that things are what they are. And what else do we have other than the way things “seem”? I experience what I experience - nothing further can be known. HOWEVER - while we could just stop there - most of us don’t. For most of us, it seems that non-accepting, questioning, doubting, believing, disbelieving, desiring, grasping, wanting, unsatisfied conscious experiences just keep piling up. Why is this? Well - it seems like there is either an explanation for this - or it just a brute fact that has no explanation. If there is no explanation, then we should just accept our non-acceptance, our non-stoppingness, and let it go. Or not. Doesn’t matter. Alternatively, if there is an explanation - then there are two options: 1. The explanation is not accessible to us because our conscious experiences do not “point” towards the truth of the way things are. 2. The explanation is accessible to us, because our conscious experiences *do* point towards the truth of the way things are. Again, if we believe that option 1 is correct, we can just stop. Or not. It doesn’t matter. So - let’s *provisionally* assume that option 2 is correct. I say “provisionally” instead of “axiomatically” because we will revisit this assumption. Once we’ve gone as far as we can in working out the implications of it being true - we will return to this assumption and see if it still makes sense in light of where we ended up. At this point I am willing to grant that modern science provides the best methodology for translating (extrapolating?) from our truth-pointing conscious experiences to models that represent the accessible parts of how things “really” are. To the extent that anything can be said about how things really are “outside of” conscious experience - science says it. But we never have direct access to the truth - all we have are our models of the truth, which (hopefully) improve over time as we distill out the valid parts of our truth-pointing conscious experiences. Okay - now, having said all of that - what models has modern science developed? Apparently there are two fundamental theories: General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory. From Wikipedia: GR is a theoretical framework that only focuses on the force of gravity for understanding the universe in regions of both large-scale and high-mass: stars,
Re: The Weakness of Panpsychism?
On 19 Jan 2015, at 21:09, David Nyman wrote: On 19 January 2015 at 18:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/19/2015 6:01 AM, David Nyman wrote: There's an effective riposte to this, I believe, but it might be a bit subtle, so I ask you to bear with me. I think, in the first place, that it's beside the point to get hung up on the 'concreteness' or otherwise of arithmetic. Bruno's intent is rather to enquire into the possibility that every relation necessary to explain both observers and what is observed can be reduced to those of basic arithmetic or its equivalent. Such an admittedly remarkable possibility is itself suggested in the first place by the computational theory of mind and the universality of the digital machine. Further axioms relating to the emulation (or embedding) of computation in arithmetic and that of various modal logics in computation are also included at the outset, but remain to be justified by their effectiveness. This has important consequences, as we shall see. The question then is whether these assumptions lead in the right direction. According to Bruno (and I don't claim to follow him on all the detail of this) they lead in the direction of self-referential computations that simultaneously emulate or embody two distinct logical modalities (1-person and 3-person). The intersection of these distinct but mutually entangled logics presents novel possibilities of resolving previously intractable mutual reference issues since mind and body need no longer be seen as categorically orthogonal. That said, as you point out, it might still seem open to a doubter to say so what. So we have computations whose complexities purportedly embody 3-personal entities, complete with the detailed appearance of their physical environments. So these computations may simultaneously entail the putatively 1-personal points of view of such entities. These two logics may even be related in an analytic or logically necessary way. All this may be remarkably suggestive but are we forced to accept that actual conscious experience arises as a necessary consequence of all this merely arithmetical *construction*? This is where the subtlety comes into play. Remember that consciousness is here modelled as *truth*. When you really come to think about it, truth is *the* defining characteristic of consciousness. As Descartes realised (though his insight is often misconstrued) it can make no sense to doubt the truth of doubt itself. When we apply this to the mutual reference problem something truly remarkable occurs. Take the question of Smolin's claiming to 'see red'. This claim is now seen as occurring at the intersection of two logics: one 'observable', the other 'private'. However, although this entanglement may explain their co-variance and mutual reference, neither of these logics fully captures the *truth* of the claim, or if you prefer, what it would actually be *like* if the expressed belief were true. Each of them is still, as it were, a mere epistemological possibility, abstractly lurking somewhere in the infinitely extended ontology of arithmetic. But if these logics can't definitively *capture* the truth of the claims they emulate, they do point to where it might be found. It comes down to this: Is Smolin, the putative experiencer of the truth of the claim to 'see red', being *truthful*? Given the hypothesised mutual consistency of the entangled logics, this is analytically certain. Smolin is incapable of being other than truthful in this regard; ergo he does in fact 'see red'. We can, of course, deny that there is any such analytic compulsion to truth. But this is self- defeating, in exactly Descartes' sense. If there is no truth of the matter, then there is equally no red, no Smolin, no belief, no logic. The 'epistemological' assumptions have been ineffective and must be discarded. The only remainder is arithmetic itself, since that is the ontology we assumed at the outset. An interesting explication. If Smolin can't be mistaken when he says or thinks I see red - and I agree that he can't - then it must correspond to (or be entangled with) a specific third person computation (i.e. physics of his brain). But we can ask why is this entanglement, this 3p point-of-view, even needed? Isn't just Smolin, i.e. his thoughts, already realized in the infinity of computation, and even realized infinitely many times? If we ask for a simulation of a lot of people then it may be more efficient to simulate a physics that gives them consistent 3p points-of-view. But I'm not sure efficiency has any relevance in arithmetical infinity. I'm not sure I'm well equipped to answer your question, assuming I've understood it. My understanding of Bruno's schema is that it leads to a kind of Computational Library of Babel. You could say that it's the way a 'creator' might set
Re: The Weakness of Panpsychism?
On 20 January 2015 at 17:11, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: At this point, I'm somewhat persuaded that this broader sense of truth, in approximately Descartes' sense, is in fact highly relevant to what is special and, so to speak, non-negotiable about consciousness. It has the virtue that it now makes no sense to say, as Stathis wants to suggest, that the same scenario could equally well be describing an 'unconscious' (i.e. untruthful) process. I am OK, *assuming* mechanism. But Stathis' suggestion cannot logically be excluded with infinite machines. Why not? David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On 19 Jan 2015, at 19:41, meekerdb wrote: On 1/19/2015 6:35 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: A super powerful mind (or person) simulating some reality could of course cause the simulation to deviate from its physical laws. But in a simulation, not in reality. So you do (bad) theology. You talk like if we knew already what reality is. But with comp reality is anything Turing complete. So here you do an implicit metaphysical assumption, which is inconsistent with mechanism. No problem ... as long as you are aware of this. I was being sarcastic, since Jason other places assumes simulation and reality are indistinguishable. It is indistinguishable is the first person direct apprehension. But for someone able to test the statistics on its experiment outcomes, it is testable relatively to comp. If the physics does not conforms to the computationalist logic of the observable, it means that either classical computationalism is false, or that we are in an emulation à- la-Boström (to distinguish it from the infinite UD emulations). The already done quantum testings confirm a posteriori that we might live at the base emulation (by the UD or the whole of arithmetic). That base is not really emulable in the usual sense, as it is a sum on infinities of emulations in the UD. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On 19 Jan 2015, at 19:52, meekerdb wrote: On 1/19/2015 6:53 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: My belief in God is trivial. All machine introspecting are confronted to it, and from outside, in the metatheory, we can see that they can confused it (correctly, or not) with truth. The problem of the aristotelians is that they often take for granted the physical reality, which is comprehensible when doing physics, but when doing theology, the physical universe is an hypothesis, and as such, there are no evidences for it. That's fine, but it has no bearing on the relation of atheism to Christianity. Then you should have no problem with using god for definition of god larger than the abramanic god. The only problem with using god for definition of god (large or small) is that it's circular. You repeatedly write things like above, My belief in God is trivial. All machine introspecting are confronted to it, and from outside, in the metatheory, we can see that they can confused it (correctly, or not) with truth. Where God is it, but there is no definition. The closest I've seen to you defining yourgod is the unprovable truths of an axiomatic system or the fundamental basis of all being. The former is former is fairly clear and I can see how a self-referential system could confront it. The latter may be a description without a referent and I don't see why a self-referential system would necessarily confront it. This is explained by the fact that, as Gödel already knew, machines can prove their own incompleteness. Thay can intuit and infer a notion of truth from the fact that they can prove t - ~[]t, and actually inferred, from their tries here and now that they can't prove their consistency, and thus bet on ~[]t, and eventually bet on t as the simplest explanation of why they cannot prove t. So they can develop an intuition of truth, and undersatnd that they cannot define it, and that there are many true propositions that they cannot justify rationally, etc. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Manifesto Rex
I would say the point here is not so much that we need to transcend Darwinism in the sense that the theory is insufficient, but because evolution has other plans for the machinery that we use to do science. The idea that being a good scientist is maladaptive. So we would need to literally transcend Darwinism. I am not claiming I buy into this, but it is a compelling idea. On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:28 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: We need not transcend Darwinism. Darwin doesn't explain the entire universe, but much of it rather successfully, perhaps as Lee Smolin indicates, stars, galaxies, black holes, etc as well? My interest and guess is that QI, and other such matters are based, deep, down, upon the knowledge of Digital Physics and Philosophy. Digi seems to rationally explain things. -Original Message- From: Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Jan 20, 2015 7:43 am Subject: Re: Manifesto Rex Hi Rex, Interesting read. I will just start with something I've been thinking about, along these lines (I believe). It is interesting that there are a number of models of reality that are prima facie as plausible as any other but are more consistently rejected as lunacy, woo, new-age-mambo-jambo, etc. These models tend to have something in common: they suggest that we are not what we appear to be, that we are not mortal or immortal because time itself is a dream. That there is only one consciousness and we are all fundamentally the same entity, from the amoeba on. Quantum immortality. This sort of thing. They start with consciousness as the brute fact, as you posit. I have no intellectual reason to reject such ideas, but I definitely feel a resistance to them. So it also occurred to me that believing in such things appears maladaptive. Intuitively, such beliefs may lead you to be less preoccupied with survival and reproduction. So it's not so surprising that we evolved to reject such ideas but this leads to a terrible doubt: can we trust ourselves to do science? Another distasteful speculation: maybe there's *survival instinct* behind nerds and geeks being bullied. A more optimistic take: maybe real science is a possibility for the future, if we transcend Darwinism. Cheers Telmo. On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Rex Allen rexallen31...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness precedes axioms. Consciousness precedes logic. Axioms and logic exist within conscious experience - not vice versa. Consciousness comes before everything else. It is self-evident that there are conscious experiences. However, what consciousness *is* - it’s ultimate nature - is not self-evident. Further, what any particular conscious experience “means” is also not self-evident. For example: The experience of color is directly known and incontrovertible. But what the experience of color *means* is not directly known - any proposed explanation is inferential and controvertible. We do not have direct access to meaning. We only have direct access to bare uninterpreted conscious experience. So - any attempted explanation of consciousness from the outside (i.e., objectively) must be constructed from inside consciousness, by conscious processes, on a foundation of conscious experience. Not a promising situation - because any explanation must be based entirely on conscious experiences which have no intrinsic meaning, and arrived at via conscious processes which are equally lacking in intrinsic meaning. It “seems” like we could just stop here and accept that things are what they are. And what else do we have other than the way things “seem”? I experience what I experience - nothing further can be known. HOWEVER - while we could just stop there - most of us don’t. For most of us, it seems that non-accepting, questioning, doubting, believing, disbelieving, desiring, grasping, wanting, unsatisfied conscious experiences just keep piling up. Why is this? Well - it seems like there is either an explanation for this - or it just a brute fact that has no explanation. If there is no explanation, then we should just accept our non-acceptance, our non-stoppingness, and let it go. Or not. Doesn’t matter. Alternatively, if there is an explanation - then there are two options: 1. The explanation is not accessible to us because our conscious experiences do not “point” towards the truth of the way things are. 2. The explanation is accessible to us, because our conscious experiences *do* point towards the truth of the way things are. Again, if we believe that option 1 is correct, we can just stop. Or not. It doesn’t matter. So - let’s *provisionally* assume that option 2 is correct. I say “provisionally” instead of “axiomatically” because we will revisit this assumption. Once we’ve gone as far as we can in working
Re: Manifesto Rex
We need not transcend Darwinism. Darwin doesn't explain the entire universe, but much of it rather successfully, perhaps as Lee Smolin indicates, stars, galaxies, black holes, etc as well? My interest and guess is that QI, and other such matters are based, deep, down, upon the knowledge of Digital Physics and Philosophy. Digi seems to rationally explain things. -Original Message- From: Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Jan 20, 2015 7:43 am Subject: Re: Manifesto Rex Hi Rex, Interesting read. I will just start with something I've been thinking about, along these lines (I believe). It is interesting that there are a number of models of reality that are prima facie as plausible as any other but are more consistently rejected as lunacy, woo, new-age-mambo-jambo, etc. These models tend to have something in common: they suggest that we are not what we appear to be, that we are not mortal or immortal because time itself is a dream. That there is only one consciousness and we are all fundamentally the same entity, from the amoeba on. Quantum immortality. This sort of thing. They start with consciousness as the brute fact, as you posit. I have no intellectual reason to reject such ideas, but I definitely feel a resistance to them. So it also occurred to me that believing in such things appears maladaptive. Intuitively, such beliefs may lead you to be less preoccupied with survival and reproduction. So it's not so surprising that we evolved to reject such ideas but this leads to a terrible doubt: can we trust ourselves to do science? Another distasteful speculation: maybe there's *survival instinct* behind nerds and geeks being bullied. A more optimistic take: maybe real science is a possibility for the future, if we transcend Darwinism. Cheers Telmo. On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Rex Allen rexallen31...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness precedes axioms. Consciousness precedes logic. Axioms and logic exist within conscious experience - not vice versa. Consciousness comes before everything else. It is self-evident that there are conscious experiences. However, what consciousness *is* - it’s ultimate nature - is not self-evident. Further, what any particular conscious experience “means” is also not self-evident. For example: The experience of color is directly known and incontrovertible. But what the experience of color *means* is not directly known - any proposed explanation is inferential and controvertible. We do not have direct access to meaning. We only have direct access to bare uninterpreted conscious experience. So - any attempted explanation of consciousness from the outside (i.e., objectively) must be constructed from inside consciousness, by conscious processes, on a foundation of conscious experience. Not a promising situation - because any explanation must be based entirely on conscious experiences which have no intrinsic meaning, and arrived at via conscious processes which are equally lacking in intrinsic meaning. It “seems” like we could just stop here and accept that things are what they are. And what else do we have other than the way things “seem”? I experience what I experience - nothing further can be known. HOWEVER - while we could just stop there - most of us don’t. For most of us, it seems that non-accepting, questioning, doubting, believing, disbelieving, desiring, grasping, wanting, unsatisfied conscious experiences just keep piling up. Why is this? Well - it seems like there is either an explanation for this - or it just a brute fact that has no explanation. If there is no explanation, then we should just accept our non-acceptance, our non-stoppingness, and let it go. Or not. Doesn’t matter. Alternatively, if there is an explanation - then there are two options: The explanation is not accessible to us because our conscious experiences do not “point” towards the truth of the way things are. The explanation is accessible to us, because our conscious experiences *do* point towards the truth of the way things are. Again, if we believe that option 1 is correct, we can just stop. Or not. It doesn’t matter. So - let’s *provisionally* assume that option 2 is correct. I say “provisionally” instead of “axiomatically” because we will revisit this assumption. Once we’ve gone as far as we can in working out the implications of it being true - we will return to this assumption and see if it still makes sense in light of where we ended up. At this point I am willing to grant that modern science provides the best methodology for translating (extrapolating?) from our truth-pointing conscious experiences to models that represent the accessible parts of how things “really” are. To the extent that anything can be said about how things really are “outside of” conscious experience - science says it. But we
Re: The Weakness of Panpsychism?
On 19 January 2015 at 18:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: conceptually disconnected from a base ontology that has no knowledge or need of them. If we can accept consciousness as the model (in the mathematicians sense) of such a truth level, What does truth level mean? I don't see what the levels of truth are; there are true sentences and false sentences and decidable and undecidable sentences. Are you referring to true sentences in a metalanguage? And in what sense can a consciousness model a truth level; sounds like a category mismatch? I simply meant the 'level' at which truth is to be found, but on reflection, the word level is redundant. I note Bruno's comment, in another thread, that: For a logician, true means satisfied by a reality, with *reality* modelled by the notion of *model*. This helps to avoid unnecessary philosophical debates. I'd be happy with that definition of true in this context. If consciousness is a truth, it must be satisfied by a distinguishable reality. The model or exemplar of that particular reality (i.e. what makes it distinct from any public manifestation) is accessible only self-referentially. Nonetheless (as we have already agreed) the 'public warrant' for its truth is that its consistent assertion is analytically indefeasible. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On 19 Jan 2015, at 19:58, meekerdb wrote: On 1/19/2015 7:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Jan 2015, at 01:11, meekerdb wrote: On 1/18/2015 10:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 16 Jan 2015, at 10:32, LizR wrote: Clearly one cannot disbelieve in God without knowing, or at least having an idea of, what God is. Personally I don't disbelieve in God, I merely find the idea highly unlikely and don't find that it contributes anything to discussions such as why is there something rather than nothing? So I am agnostic, as I am about all the other gods, not to mention Santa, who I recently saw on Doctor Who. (Of course I do believe in Daleks...) If you believe in Daleks, you believe enough to believe in the God of the machine. We need it, to use the theory of machine's dream as an explanation why we see physical universes and sometimes pink elephants, despite nothing like that really exists. I give the math to see if we get right the number of pink elephants in the many-dreams (by number) interpretation of elementary arithmetic (0 I guess, and hope). Keep in mind that God is defined by being the object of the theory of everything, or, by definition, the answer we look for with the question why is there something instead of nothing?. The question is not if God exists or not. But if But that's silly. You presume God exists, but with no description, With no name or description in the sense of the logicians. But I gave an informal and general meaning for the term: it is what we search, the origin of reality, or the explanation of reality, or the better explanation that we can find for reality, etc. so the only task is to find a description to go with the word God. If you're going to ask whether something exists that cannot be defined ostensively, then you need to define it by description. Otherwise it's just wordplay. Compare: The question isn't whether Paul Bunyan exists or not. But if Paul Bunyan = the physical universe? Paul Bunyan = a mathematical structure? Which one? Paul Bunyan = a dream by a universal machine? Paul Bunyan = a sum on all dreams by all universal machines? Paul Bunyan = the one who lost itself in a labyrinth of dreams? Paul Bunyan = the one who plays hide and seek with Itself? Paul Bunyan = the universal person? Paul Bunyan = the universal person completions? (if that exists) Paul Bunyan = Allah? Paul Bunyan = Jesus? Paul Bunyan = Krishna? Paul Bunyan = my tax collector? Paul Bunyan = the one who made the cat in its own image, and then made the humans to gives the vat the modern comfort, with TV nad bag of catnip? etc. Except that with God, people understand the questions, but with Paul Bunyan, it looks like funny, unless you have a reason to think that Paul Bunyan is at the origin of reality. But then you must provide some supplementary explanations. In that case Paul Bunyan would be another name of God,in the general sense, but it looks too much like a precise name, which does not fit with most axioms accepted for God. I'm afraid you continue playing with words. On the contrary, you are playing with words. God is too much like a precise name. Since 523. In our region of the world. When the subject has been made into dogma, and used to control people, so tehere is no point in even mentioning such theories, except that we don't have to infer from this that they are completely wrong on all aspects. I use God in the precise vague mening of the Parmenides, plotinus. At the start, we are neutral if that god is just the physical universe, or a mathematical reality, or a cuttlefish. It is the name theist pray to and expect miracles from and capitalize as a proper noun and kill for. That is the current theory, but it is certainly defectuous at many level, if only for its lack of clarity, contradictions, etc. Yet you use it instead of nous or aperion or other less loaded terms. Because the term god describes often the three platonic god= the One, the Nous, and the Universal Soul; or the aristotelian two gods: the creator and the creation. Scientific attitude invites to use the terms in the most general sense. Then we can add precision, revised our notions with the facts, etc. I use a definition of God which is understandable by everyone. The reason, or the cause (in a large sense) of the observable and feelable in both its conscious and material aspects. For example, in that case, materialism can be described by the equation God = Primitive Matter. Idealism by God = primitive consciousness. Neutral monism by God is neither matter, nor ideas or consciousness, but something else, etc. The term reality would be OK, except it has already a more refined meaning in the literature, which could lead to misleading. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To
Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics?
On 19 Jan 2015, at 19:40, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 6:36 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 18 Jan 2015, at 20:42, meekerdb wrote: On 1/18/2015 6:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: With the definition you gave in a preceding post, and with which I agree, everyone believe in some God. The question is always: which one? And where it does come from, and why. All philosophers and most scientists have some idea about what is fundamental reality - but (unless they are theologians) they recognize it is just a working hypothesis. I'd say most people don't even think about it enough to have a definite opinion. Well, it might be about time. Many people don't think to this, because we abandonned the subject to professional brainwashers since a long time. Most people are just not interested in fundamental science. Usually people like to take things for granted, and dislike doubting everything, as Descartes knew already we have to do if we search truth. The more I think about it, the more I doubt that these subjects were simply abandoned in an innocent fashion. The problem is that beliefs about fundamental reality are at the foundations of political power, and the powerful know this, even if only intuitively. Yes, since always. That is why we are mucky to be in a place where scientists have regained some freedom in some domain, but clearly not in all (theology and human science are still not done with the scientific attitude). When atheist politicians say that we must respect the Vatican, they are agreeing on some border of power. They are saying, ok we can't have absolute power but we can negotiate peace with the Vatican. Vatican and bishops love atheism, because atheists are their allies in preventing seriousness in theological matter. The subtlety is that there is now a very powerful religion which has no name but is profoundly materialistic. I think you intuit its existence, and were perhaps a victim of it, by the suppression of your thesis. The original atheists were themselves victim of manipulations, but then they have gotten more than 30 years to apologize and admits the facts, but they have aggravated it by suppressing the thesis, and defaming it up to the point of making the prize I got in Paris disappear. Bruno Telmo. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Why was nobody murdered because of this cartoon?
On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 7:49 PM, chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com wrote: Since 1961 muslims have been subjected to increasingly draconian restrictions on their freedome and a media that depicts them in as dehumanizing way as possible. Well, the media certainly didn't need to work very hard to do that! In recent days it has been remarkably easy to depict Islamic culture as dehumanizing. The wankers at Charlie Hebdo are part of that. Of course they should be free to do it, but its no wonder this marginalized sector feels angry about it. Feeling angry is the natural state for Muslims. In the thirteenth century Islamic culture was the most advanced and progressive on the planet, but it's been straight downhill ever since, and today finding something to be offended about at is the only thing Islamic culture is still really really good at. The media now presents the story as though white french people should be afraid of Algerians. This has nothing to do with Algeria, the French or Charlie Hebdo, this has to do with Islamic values. Charlie Hebdo isn't even the worst or most idiotic Islam vs cartoon war. Back in 2005 it was Danish cartoons not French cartoons that cause violent riots and set Muslim nitwits off on a murder spree that ended up killing more than 200 people. Let me know if you think the cartoons deserved such a violent reaction, they were originally in Dutch but you can view them here with their English translation: http://www.aina.org/releases/20060201143237.htm John k Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Kim Jones kimjo...@ozemail.com.au wrote: stop using that ridiculous and meaningless art term abstract. [...] Nothing is abstract. So you're saying that the word abstract should be removed from the English language because it will never be needed?! John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics?
On 19 Jan 2015, at 21:33, meekerdb wrote: On 1/19/2015 9:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Like 0 universe, 1 universe, 2 universe, ... aleph_0 universes, aleph_1 universes, etc. We need faith to believe in anything different from our own consciousness here-and-now. But our perception (part of our consciousness) provides evidence for 1 universe. ? No, only for a universe. Not one. On the contrary, the evidence is that each big things we tought could be one, appears to be multiple: one earth = many planets, one solar system = many stars, one galaxy == many galaxies, one cluster of galaxies, many cluster of galaxies, ... One universe is already a strong metaphysical assumption. I didn't assume one. I didn't make any assumption at all. I just pointed out that we have direct evidence for one, and not for other numbers. We have evidence for A universe. Not for 1. usually we believe in 1 universe, because we tend to decide that everything (physical) is in the universe. But then we say one *by definition*. But I do not know any fact which can be taken as an evidence that there is only one universe, nor even what that would mean, as I don't take the idea of even one , or even 1, universe for granted. That is the type of God which is incompatible with machine theology. So it is not unevidenced faith to believe there is one. To be sure all observation includes Descartean doubt, but that doesn't mean it's not evidence. Honestly, I am not sure what evidence you are thinking about, except a sort of definition. With computationalism, it will depend on the logics of S4Grz1, Z1* and X1* to decide if there is three or less physical realms. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On 19 Jan 2015, at 20:36, meekerdb wrote: On 1/19/2015 7:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Jan 2015, at 04:51, meekerdb wrote: On 1/18/2015 7:24 PM, LizR wrote: On 19 January 2015 at 07:14, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/18/2015 12:16 AM, Jason Resch wrote: Because 2+2=4, and there's nothing you (or anyone/anything) can do to change that. Sure there is. 2+2=0 in mod 4 arithmetic - which is good for describing some things. I hope you are being flippant and don't really think that disproves what Jason has said! If in doubt consider whether the phrase in mod 4 arithmetic was necessary to what you wrote. If it is, then arithmetic remains necessarily so until you can come up with something that is self- contradictory without any such qualifiers being required. As you must know from my other posts, I don't consider self- consistency to entail existence. So the fact that 2+2=4 is true doesn't imply anything about existence. We suppose that you agree with elementary arithmetic, and notably with the use of existential quantification. From 2+2= 4 it is valid to deduce Ex(x + x = 4). And as we have chosen arithmetic to define the basic ontology, it means that we have the existence of 2 in the basic ontology. The rest is playing with words. You know very well that the E of symbolic logic is not the same as exists in English. There are different meanings of existence determined by context. That is my point, so each time we use exist we must give the context. Now, in the TOE, one notion of existence can be more fundamental than another. With computationalism, we can take the E of the logicians doing arithmetic, and all other notion of existence are recovered by the modal variant of it, like the physical existence is sum up in []Ex[]P(x), which is itself well defined in arithmetic (without modal operator) but by a much longer sentences, or collections of sentences. Ex(x+x=4) just means there is number OK. as defined by Peano's axioms that provably satisfies the expression. Not at all. That means that PA believes Ex(x+x=4). Ex(x+x=4) means that N satisfies the idea that there is some number n having the property that n + n = 4. The meaning is in the semantics, not in the theory. It no more proves that 2 exists in the general sense than Ex(x=Holmes sidekick) proves that Dr. Watson exists. OK, but with computationalism we use the result that we don't need to assume anything more than 0, 1, 2, (together with the addition and multiplication laws). So, once and for all, we accept that our most primitive object, which really exist are 0, 1, 2, ... and nothing else. We would use string theory as fundamental theory, we would assume the strings. But with comp any theory will do, and the less physical it looks, the more we can explain the physical without assuming it, which is the goal. (and the necessity for solving the mind-body problem). Now, we could us S and K, and (K,K), ((K,K),S), etc. instead of 0, and s(0) ..., as physics and consciousness have been shown to not depend on the particular ontology used. That you consider mod 4 to be a qualifier is just a convention of language. If we were talking about time what's six hours after 1900: answer 0100, because there the convention is mod 24. But my serious point is that arithmetic is a model of countable things we invented and it's not some magic that controls what exists. OK, but then computationalism is false. What is the magic thing you believe in making a brain non Turing emulable? I think a brain is Turing emulable by a physical device. First a brain is provably emulable by many non physical device, using the original definition of emulable, by the mathematicians who discovered the concept. Second, even physucally emulable relies on this mathematical definition, and if that definition leads to many problems (already discussed a lot here, like Putnama-Mallah implementation problems, the mind-body problem itself, etc.). You purport to show that numbers alone are sufficient, but I find this doubtful. I think your numbers must also instantiate physics to emulate thought. Then UDA is wrong somewhere, or you reify magical matter, and a magical mind, and a magical identity thesis. In which case it a physical as well as mental theory. That's a good thing, but I think it's a theory of reality - not necessarily a proof that reality must be that. It has to be like that, or you ascribe to universal machine an ability to distinguish, in direct introspective way, physical from arithmetical. How? The MGA shows that you *can* do that, only by adding non Turing emulable magic to both mind and matter. Bruno Brent Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving
Re: Digest for everything-list@googlegroups.com - 4 updates in 1 topic
On 19 Jan 2015, at 21:28, meekerdb wrote: On 1/19/2015 9:10 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: But existence only in the mathematical sense which is tautological; i.e. implicit in some axioms, Then all theories are tautological. But the evidence for them is not only tautological. Exactly. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
From: John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2015 9:56 AM Subject: Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults? On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Kim Jones kimjo...@ozemail.com.au wrote: stop using that ridiculous and meaningless art term abstract. [...] Nothing is abstract. So you're saying that the word abstract should be removed from the English language because it will never be needed?! Except when an abstraction needs to be expressed and talked about abstractly, without abstractions and being able to speak of abstract entities modern information science and templatizable data structures would not exist. -Chris John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics?
On 20 Jan 2015, at 07:17, 'Roger' via Everything List wrote: Chris, Mostly I agree with everything you said. Specifically: By corollary and by symmetry this same optic of doubt can shine upon the notion of a real physical entity underlying the stuff we call real. What is real about a proton, electron, photon…etc.? Roger: I agree. Proton, electron, etc. are just names for existent entities with certain properties. Even if these entities are abstract arithmetical propositions, the existent entities previously called the absolute lack of all (me), two of these entities looking at each other would seem as real to each other as two rock- solid particles. Reality is relative in this way, I think. OK. But it will help you, when you take the computationalist hypothesis very seriously, to not consider that proton are made of arithmetical relations. It will be more like if they are dreamed. If you dream that you are at the beach, playing with the sand, you can conceive that such a sand is not made of grain of sands, just dreamed like that, and although proton are not exactly dreamed in that way, as they involved infinity of dreams (and dreams = computation seen from inside, with seen from inside defined by variants of the logic of self-reference). With digital mechanism (computationalism), below your substitution level there is a competition between an infinity of universal numbers, to bring your continuations: the physical remains something quite special in our lives. The simple finite groups might play a role in the measure problem, by moonshine. Physics has a reason, and metaphysics too. In regard to the auto-emergence and that's just the way it is stuff, I also totally agree. It could be true, but is just not very satisfying to me to say that's just the way it is. I was trying to do the autoemergent thing by saying that even what we previously thought of as the absolute lack-of-all is an existent entity idea and showing how it could self-replicate to provide an expanding space like our universe. I think one of the issues is in our perhaps incorrect distinction between something and nothing, which is what I was trying to get at. This distinction keeps us wondering well why is it all here. But, I'll keep working on it as we all should on our ideas. As above, good luck to all of us! And, listen to The Who! Thanks :) Bruno On Tuesday, January 20, 2015 at 12:35:43 AM UTC-5, cdemorsella wrote: From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] Jason et al., Overall, I can never disprove that mathematical constructs don't exist outside the head somewhere just like I can't prove my view that what we've previously considered to be the absolute lack-of- all is itself an existent entity just because no one can never or directly experiment on either these mathematical constructs or the absolute lack-of-all. But, what we can do is to provide logical evidence for our ideas as we've each been trying to do on this list, and to take our ideas and try to build a model of reality out of them that can eventually make testable predictions. This is what many on this list are working on, and I applaud them for it even if I don't agree with the underlying idea. Eventually, all of us will need to make some testable predictions, which if they get experimental evidence backing them up,will convince others to other follow up on our ideas and models. This is what I think many of us are working on either in our spare time or full-time. Good luck to all of us! Nice statement with a good sentiment behind it. This list (and its long rich trail of past threads, which contain some real gems) is a lively place to be; hard to keep up sometimes. I share your view that it cannot be proved (yet at least) that mathematical entities – and all other pure abstract system entities (as in say the laws of the universe) – have an existence independent from and external to our human cultural history. It can be equally hypothesized that our laws of physics, our logic, our math are all our models (our historical evolution of thought through recorded history)… models that the cultures emergent from our species have evolved to explain experienced reality…. We have our current best fit models – both in science and in math. By corollary and by symmetry this same optic of doubt can shine upon the notion of a real physical entity underlying the stuff we call real. What is real about a proton, electron, photon…etc.? Other than their properties and their current state. There is an undeniable (I take that back, you will always find somebody, somewhere, who will disagree)… a mostly undeniable realness to the macro experience of being in reality. It is a realness that has repeating patterns in it (wave interaction for example) that we have noticed as a species and
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On 21 Jan 2015, at 4:56 am, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Kim Jones kimjo...@ozemail.com.au wrote: stop using that ridiculous and meaningless art term abstract. [...] Nothing is abstract. So you're saying that the word abstract should be removed from the English language because it will never be needed?! John K Clark It's not a word that should be used, no. It implies that something is taking a quick holiday in the Platonic realm, merely for the benefit of the researcher who will fairly soon remove those parentheses and pluck said object out of abstraction land and back into the real world. It's another example of how embedded in our culture is the idea that the non-physical exists, yet this word seems to sanctify such an anomaly for a physicalist, momentarily allowing him to use it with impunity. Platonists have no need for such a term because everything is abstract already. The problem of needing such a word to make it possible for a physicalist to talk about the immaterial without being kneecapped by other physicalists occurs only in a material universe. I believe there exist words that are dangerously misleading and this is one of them. I equally believe there are great many more words which should exist but which don't, except as a need. There are only needs. Needs are proof of the existence of persons. These needs get expressed as beliefs which are frozen as words. Needs, however, evolve along with the environment they relate to and some needs can even or should even evaporate as our knowledge increases. Language continually lugs around ancient needs frozen solid. This is a very great problem in communication. K -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On 1/20/2015 9:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Ex(x+x=4) just means there is number OK. as defined by Peano's axioms that provably satisfies the expression. Not at all. That means that PA believes Ex(x+x=4). ?? But you use []p to equally mean provable p and believes p, so what does it mean PA believes Ex(x+x=4) other than it is provable? Brent Ex(x+x=4) means that N satisfies the idea that there is some number n having the property that n + n = 4. The meaning is in the semantics, not in the theory. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On 1/20/2015 9:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The only problem with using god for definition of god (large or small) is that it's circular. You repeatedly write things like above, My belief in God is trivial. All machine introspecting are confronted to it, and from outside, in the metatheory, we can see that they can confused it (correctly, or not) with truth. Where God is it, but there is no definition. The closest I've seen to you defining your god is the unprovable truths of an axiomatic system or the fundamental basis of all being. The former is former is fairly clear and I can see how a self-referential system could confront it. The latter may be a description without a referent and I don't see why a self-referential system would necessarily confront it. This is explained by the fact that, as Gödel already knew, machines can prove their own incompleteness. Thay can intuit and infer a notion of truth from the fact that they can prove t - ~[]t, and actually inferred, from their tries here and now that they can't prove their consistency, and thus bet on ~[]t, and eventually bet on t as the simplest explanation of why they cannot prove t. So they can develop an intuition of truth, and undersatnd that they cannot define it, and that there are many true propositions that they cannot justify rationally, etc. Suppose they prove (which is likely true of all humans) that they are inconsistent, on some point, but avoid ex falso quodlibet? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
Then it is a good thing that computer science did not listen to you Kim,
regarding the concept of abstraction and abstract classes {e.g. templates
for concrete entities fully implementing the abstracted methods and properties}
being -- in your opinion -- useless.Abstraction is one of the guiding
principles of good software design; without abstraction and the ability to
design abstract partially implemented classes, building good extensible
software would become much harder to do.In an informatic sense an entity is
abstract when it cannot be instantiated (until the abstract bits are given a
concrete implementation by a derived concrete class.The ultimate abstraction,
in computer science is the interface, which defines a pure contract and is
without implementation. Interfaces can never e instantiated into real objects;
only the concrete implementation of the interface can ever exist in reality.
However, the interface does provide the guiding contract; it is the template
which the implementing concrete instance must implement or fulfill. Interfaces
and abstract base classes are both exceedingly important and useful in modern
software design.Layers of abstraction are of central importance to the
architecture and building of non trivial software. If you value software and
all the products and services software makes possible then you too value
abstraction and the ability to think and interact in terms of abstractions
whether or not you are aware of them. -Chris
From: Kim Jones kimjo...@ozemail.com.au
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com everything-list@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2015 1:32 PM
Subject: Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how
the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On 21 Jan 2015, at 4:56 am, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Kim Jones kimjo...@ozemail.com.au wrote:
stop using that ridiculous and meaningless art term abstract. [...] Nothing
is abstract.
So you're saying that the word abstract should be removed from the English
language because it will never be needed?!
John K Clark
It's not a word that should be used, no. It implies that something is taking a
quick holiday in the Platonic realm, merely for the benefit of the researcher
who will fairly soon remove those parentheses and pluck said object out of
abstraction land and back into the real world. It's another example of how
embedded in our culture is the idea that the non-physical exists, yet this word
seems to sanctify such an anomaly for a physicalist, momentarily allowing him
to use it with impunity. Platonists have no need for such a term because
everything is abstract already. The problem of needing such a word to make it
possible for a physicalist to talk about the immaterial without being
kneecapped by other physicalists occurs only in a material universe.
I believe there exist words that are dangerously misleading and this is one of
them. I equally believe there are great many more words which should exist but
which don't, except as a need.
There are only needs. Needs are proof of the existence of persons. These needs
get expressed as beliefs which are frozen as words. Needs, however, evolve
along with the environment they relate to and some needs can even or should
even evaporate as our knowledge increases. Language continually lugs around
ancient needs frozen solid. This is a very great problem in communication.
K
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Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I use God in the sense of the platonist, who introduced the field of inquiry theology. Not that it matters much what some guy who lived 2500 years ago thought but Plato didn't believe in God he believed in The Gods, more specifically he believed in something he called Forms, like Gods they were perfect and eternal, but unlike Gods they were not alive and didn't move or think. In all case God is by definition the origin of things. Then God could be stupider than the stupidest person you ever met, be less conscious than a earthworm, and have less effect on your day to day life than your pet hamster. Kind of a pathetic thing to confer the lofty title of God on don't you think. It can be related with the god of the philosophers. The God of the philosophers has had no effect on world history or on current events and is so flabby fuzzy and general as to be utterly useless. The God as a person idea has had a enormous and enormously destructive impact on world history and current events And I still don't understand what you mean by spiritual reality and physical reality and the examples you gave don't have any logical consistency as far as I can tell. ? ! It is not clear if mathematics is the root of physics or physics is the root of mathematics. Because you stop at step 3 Because you make blunder at step 3. You would be able to understand that computationalism makes physical reality an aspect of the arithmetical reality. That is the point of the UDA, You forget IHA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uda The theory of everything is Robinson Arithmetic (RA). That cannot be because induction is something and unlike Peano Arithmetic Robinson has nothing to say about induction. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics?
On 1/20/2015 10:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The more I think about it, the more I doubt that these subjects were simply abandoned in an innocent fashion. The problem is that beliefs about fundamental reality are at the foundations of political power, and the powerful know this, even if only intuitively. Read Craig A. James little book, The Religion Virus for a history of religion from that standpoint. Yes, since always. That is why we are mucky to be in a place where scientists have regained some freedom in some domain, but clearly not in all (theology and human science are still not done with the scientific attitude). We're in a mucky place because a lot of theologians promote mucky religions. :-) When atheist politicians say that we must respect the Vatican, they are agreeing on some border of power. They are saying, ok we can't have absolute power but we can negotiate peace with the Vatican. Vatican and bishops love atheism, because atheists are their allies in preventing seriousness in theological matter. Incidentally, I went to a lecture by a theologian last night. He gave a definition of theism, the same as mine: Belief in a supernaturally powerful person who cares about human behavior and wants to be worshipped. And he went on to say that all serious theology is a-theistic. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Free Speech is not Free unless it is allowed for every point of view
From: spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com Forget ball games. I wager that when the jihadists strike here in either a series of small attacks or another 911, your side, for coddling the jihadists will be held to account. And, sadly, people will say, At least under Bush we felt safe. Like any good fascist you take your propagandist tactics right from Goebbels playbook. Just because I don't want get with your insane genocidal clash of civilizations program does not mean that therefore I am coddling jihadist criminals. Screw you and your attempt to pin responsibility on me -- and everyone who does not buy into your extremist world views - for the acts of violent criminals. If you really believe your own invective then you should be going off yourself to fight your crusade... why aren't you? Are you a coward? Who demands others go do the dying for your psychopathic desires -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jan 19, 2015 7:21 pm Subject: Re: Free Speech is not Free unless it is allowed for every point of view From: spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com Hmmm! Then you have wasted your companie's, valuable time bantering with someone you don't like and can't control? Some software schmuck, you must be. Where are your ethics, man? Oh, wait, I take that back, for most progressives do not possess this attribute, only the hunger to control. Well, mah trailer needs propane re-fuelin' and I gotta git down to thuh liquer store before mama june kills me. Wee dawgies! Now yew git on and a keep a cod'in and developin' whatever that is? P.S, the seahawks suck and the pats will roll over yer candy asses. What do yew and the Pats have in common? Ansdwer: Deflated balls. Bwah hah hah hah! Even Mama June bust out laffin at that wun. Why would my company care if I take a few minutes here and there during the day? It knows -- from working deployed, low defect, high performant software -- that it gets excellent value from my services, which is why it continues to have me (and others like me) fulfill them. This is also why the globally preeminent technology companies I work for DO NOT -- AND WILL NEVER -- higher incompetent angry windbags like you... who have an overblown sense of their own entitlement coupled with a lack of any valuable real skills. You have nothing of any value to exchange; your labor is just not worth very much to them. P.S. The Seahawks won the game and are going to the Super Bowl. Spectacular last five minutes and over time play on that game. But... Hey there goober, isn't it time for you to mosey on down to see if your (government) check is in the mail box (delivered to you by our socialist mail service). -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jan 19, 2015 6:35 pm Subject: Fw: Free Speech is not Free unless it is allowed for every point of view - Forwarded Message - From: spudboy100 via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com Nupe. Basically you are explaining away the election losses and the endless trail of middle class taxpayer dollars, to the blue state governments, their government unions, and the underclass, who is content with Mexican billionaire and Obola contributor, Carlos Slim Helu's cheapo chump trak phones, welfare checks, food stamps, ghettos, hoods, and barrios. What has changed is that from a political studies pov, enough of the demographic of the white middle and working classes, who want to work (unlike your crack and meth head friends), realize they have gotten burned bad, by a political class that is neither interested in their financial well being, nor their physical safety, from your Islamic State sympathizers, like yourself. I see a time, fairly soon, when a plurality of American residents, whether legally here or not will say to themselves, at least under Bushie I felt safe! I probably care for the Bushes in US politics on a scale somewhat less then yourself (hard to say since your progie derangement must make cognitive thinking difficult at best for you), but based on what is happening overseas, this day will arrive. Keep on strumming your guitar dude, its supposedly therapeutic. Don't have the time (nor the desire) to respond to your delusional oxycontin fueled rant in detail -- because like most progressives -- I am at work, earning money for my family to live on. Not all of us can be Tea Party welfare queens. -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jan 19, 2015 3:50 pm Subject: Re: Free Speech is not Free
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I use God in the sense of the platonist, who introduced the field of inquiry theology. Not that it matters much what some guy who lived 2500 years ago thought but Plato didn't believe in God he believed in The Gods, more specifically he believed in something he called Forms, like Gods they were perfect and eternal, but unlike Gods they were not alive and didn't move or think. In all case God is by definition the origin of things. Then God could be stupider than the stupidest person you ever met, be less conscious than a earthworm, and have less effect on your day to day life than your pet hamster. Kind of a pathetic thing to confer the lofty title of God on don't you think. It can be related with the god of the philosophers. The God of the philosophers has had no effect on world history or on current events and is so flabby fuzzy and general as to be utterly useless. The God as a person idea has had a enormous and enormously destructive impact on world history or on current events And I still don't understand what you mean by spiritual reality and physical reality and the examples you gave don't have any logical consistency as far as I can tell. ? ! It is not clear if mathematics is the root of physics or physics is the root of mathematics. Because you stop at step 3 Because you make blunder at step 3. You would be able to understand that computationalism makes physical reality an aspect of the arithmetical reality. That is the point of the UDA, You forget IHA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uda The theory of everything is Robinson Arithmetic (RA). That cannot be because induction is something and unlike Peano Arithmetic Robinson has nothing to say about induction. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Manifesto Rex
Hi Telmo, Is there a better starting point than consciousness? My main thought was to suggest that the theory of evolution, taken to it's logical conclusion, supports a Kantian division of reality into phenomenal and noumenal realms. We are entities whose consciousnesses are shaped only with an eye towards what promotes survival and reproduction. Consciousness isn't the least concerned with truth - only with usefulness. Maybe this explains many of the conundrums that are pondered in this group. If you completely discard the concept of truth and replace it entirely with evolutionary usefulness - does that change anything? Rex On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 7:43 AM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Rex, Interesting read. I will just start with something I've been thinking about, along these lines (I believe). It is interesting that there are a number of models of reality that are prima facie as plausible as any other but are more consistently rejected as lunacy, woo, new-age-mambo-jambo, etc. These models tend to have something in common: they suggest that we are not what we appear to be, that we are not mortal or immortal because time itself is a dream. That there is only one consciousness and we are all fundamentally the same entity, from the amoeba on. Quantum immortality. This sort of thing. They start with consciousness as the brute fact, as you posit. I have no intellectual reason to reject such ideas, but I definitely feel a resistance to them. So it also occurred to me that believing in such things appears maladaptive. Intuitively, such beliefs may lead you to be less preoccupied with survival and reproduction. So it's not so surprising that we evolved to reject such ideas but this leads to a terrible doubt: can we trust ourselves to do science? Another distasteful speculation: maybe there's *survival instinct* behind nerds and geeks being bullied. A more optimistic take: maybe real science is a possibility for the future, if we transcend Darwinism. Cheers Telmo. On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Rex Allen rexallen31...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness precedes axioms. Consciousness precedes logic. Axioms and logic exist within conscious experience - not vice versa. Consciousness comes before everything else. It is self-evident that there are conscious experiences. However, what consciousness *is* - it’s ultimate nature - is not self-evident. Further, what any particular conscious experience “means” is also not self-evident. For example: The experience of color is directly known and incontrovertible. But what the experience of color *means* is not directly known - any proposed explanation is inferential and controvertible. We do not have direct access to meaning. We only have direct access to bare uninterpreted conscious experience. So - any attempted explanation of consciousness from the outside (i.e., objectively) must be constructed from inside consciousness, by conscious processes, on a foundation of conscious experience. Not a promising situation - because any explanation must be based entirely on conscious experiences which have no intrinsic meaning, and arrived at via conscious processes which are equally lacking in intrinsic meaning. It “seems” like we could just stop here and accept that things are what they are. And what else do we have other than the way things “seem”? I experience what I experience - nothing further can be known. HOWEVER - while we could just stop there - most of us don’t. For most of us, it seems that non-accepting, questioning, doubting, believing, disbelieving, desiring, grasping, wanting, unsatisfied conscious experiences just keep piling up. Why is this? Well - it seems like there is either an explanation for this - or it just a brute fact that has no explanation. If there is no explanation, then we should just accept our non-acceptance, our non-stoppingness, and let it go. Or not. Doesn’t matter. Alternatively, if there is an explanation - then there are two options: 1. The explanation is not accessible to us because our conscious experiences do not “point” towards the truth of the way things are. 2. The explanation is accessible to us, because our conscious experiences *do* point towards the truth of the way things are. Again, if we believe that option 1 is correct, we can just stop. Or not. It doesn’t matter. So - let’s *provisionally* assume that option 2 is correct. I say “provisionally” instead of “axiomatically” because we will revisit this assumption. Once we’ve gone as far as we can in working out the implications of it being true - we will return to this assumption and see if it still makes sense in light of where we ended up. At this point I am willing to grant that modern science provides the best methodology for translating (extrapolating?) from our truth-pointing conscious experiences to models that
Re: Manifesto Rex
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I would say the point here is not so much that we need to transcend Darwinism in the sense that the theory is insufficient, but because evolution has other plans for the machinery that we use to do science. The idea that being a good scientist is maladaptive. So we would need to literally transcend Darwinism. It happens all the time, the man who invented the condom transcend Darwinism. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics?
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 1:40 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/20/2015 10:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The more I think about it, the more I doubt that these subjects were simply abandoned in an innocent fashion. The problem is that beliefs about fundamental reality are at the foundations of political power, and the powerful know this, even if only intuitively. Read Craig A. James little book, The Religion Virus for a history of religion from that standpoint. Yes, since always. That is why we are mucky to be in a place where scientists have regained some freedom in some domain, but clearly not in all (theology and human science are still not done with the scientific attitude). We're in a mucky place because a lot of theologians promote mucky religions. :-) And of those that aspire to rigor, some eventually reach the problem: preaching my brand of ignorance seems awfully conceited and self-centered. Why push/force? There's a paradox with education here: that we have to learn to tie our shoes somewhere, to learn that we'll never get it totally right and have no business teaching others about tying their shoes. ;-) Robin Williams as psychologist in Good Will Hunting said something along the lines: I teach this shit. I didn't say I know how to do it. PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Isn't this group supposed to be about trying to figure out how the universe works and not so much about religion and insults?
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 Kim Jones kimjo...@ozemail.com.au wrote: So you're saying that the word abstract should be removed from the English language because it will never be needed?! It's not a word that should be used, no. [...]. Platonists have no need for such a term [...] I believe there exist words that are dangerously misleading and this is one of them. It sound to me like you could get a job in the Ministry Of Truth in George Orwell's 1984, they were developing a new language called Newspeak, this is what one of the ministry's experts on that language has to say about it as he explains it to the book's hero Winston Smith: Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. [...] We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten [. . . . ] The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse r committing thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Manifesto Rex
On 1/20/2015 5:54 PM, Rex Allen wrote: Hi Telmo, Is there a better starting point than consciousness? My main thought was to suggest that the theory of evolution, taken to it's logical conclusion, supports a Kantian division of reality into phenomenal and noumenal realms. We are entities whose consciousnesses are shaped only with an eye towards what promotes survival and reproduction. Consciousness isn't the least concerned with truth - only with usefulness. Maybe this explains many of the conundrums that are pondered in this group. If you completely discard the concept of truth and replace it entirely with evolutionary usefulness - does that change anything? That's essentially the thesis of William S. Cooper's book The Origin of Reason - that our language, logic and mathematics were driven by evolution. And he suggests how it may go further. Whether you agree with him or not, it's a thought provoking book (and not a long one). Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics?
On Tuesday, January 20, 2015 at 2:49:12 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Jan 2015, at 23:48, 'Roger' via Everything List wrote: Roger: Even if no mind has yet conceived the the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point of pi, the pi proposition and therefore the process of calculating its 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point and being confident that if you do the process that that number is either 0-9 are all located inside the mind/head. My view is that whenever we talk about something existing, we have to specify where and when it exists, that is, in what context or domain it exists. A thing can exist in one place and not another. A ball can exist outside the head, and a mental construct labeled the concept of a ball can exist inside the head. If a ball can exist outside the mind/head, why can't the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point of pi exist outside the mind/head? What property must a thing have to have an independent existence outside of any mind? (according to your theory?) Jason So, if the pi process were carried out inside the mind/head long enough to figure out the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point, that mental construct for that number (which would be 0-9) would exist inside the mind/head but not outside the mind/head. So, the mind is able to reify things (like the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point of pi) so that they exist but so that they only exist inside the mind/head and not outside the mind/head. Roger: Just because things can exist outside the mind/head doesn't mean that a specific thing does occur outside the mind/head. If the pi proposition and the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point of pi can be shown outside the mind/head or any experimental evidence for the existence of the pi proposition or the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point of pi existing outside the mind/head, I'd be happy to accept it. I can see that a circle can exist outside the head, but I don't see anywhere outside the mind/head, the proposition that if you divide the circle's circumference by its diameter you get pi. But that proposition is not in the head of anybody. A body can get a representation of that proposition in some language (be it LISP or neural nets, or numbers): that is usually called a sentence, and *that* is in the head of the machine or the number. The proposition itself is what is intended by the sentence and the universal machine in presence. That pi is what you find by dividing the circle's circumference by the diameter is (true by definition), and that the sum of the inverse of all squared natural number is true, by a proposition proved by Euler. That is true. period. It was true before Euler proved it, and after, although this is only a metaphor. The number are just not concept to which time or space attribute can apply. There is no number, nor proposition, in a brain. You might find representations of number, and of propositions in the brain, but it makes no sense to say that a number is in a brain, or on the planet mars. Then a brain itself can be described as the representation of a universal numbers with respect to some other universal numbers. If you accept Church-Turing thesis, all computations exists in the elementary arithmetical reality, and in a very special redundant way, and we are there, and we must explain why the white rabbits are so rare and why the rabbit hole is so deep. The quantum almost solves that problem, but to solve the mind-body problem, we must justify why only the quantum works. Bruno Roger: I understand that the sentence, the words and the thought divide a circle's circumference by its diameter to get pi are in the mind/head. But, what is outside the head is a circle, with a circumference and a diameter. There is no process outside the mind/head saying that if you divide the circumference by the diameter, the number 3.14... results. That process and the idea of even doing it are inside the mind/head. It will give 3.14 for all physical circles and their circumferences and diameters outside the head, but the only thing outside the head is the circle. The process and the idea are inside the mind/head. The what you find by dividing... in your sentence also kind of implies that an action needs to be taken by the observer. That pi is what you find by dividing the circle's circumference by the diameter is (true by definition), and that the sum of the inverse of all squared natural number is true, by a proposition proved by Euler. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit
Re: Manifesto Rex
On 20 Jan 2015, at 11:43 pm, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: These models tend to have something in common: they suggest that we are not what we appear to be, that we are not mortal or immortal because time itself is a dream. That there is only one consciousness and we are all fundamentally the same entity, from the amoeba on. Quantum immortality. This sort of thing. They start with consciousness as the brute fact, as you posit. I have no intellectual reason to reject such ideas, but I definitely feel a resistance to them. Do you equally feel a resistance to the mainstream, standard, canonical, textbook, safe, establishment versions of reality? I only ask because it appears there are definitely good intellectual reasons to stand up and challenge some of those. So it also occurred to me that believing in such things appears maladaptive. Intuitively, such beliefs may lead you to be less preoccupied with survival and reproduction. That is a thought that has crossed my mind, too. People who sit around pulling bongs and studying shadows on cave walls tend not to go on and have business empires, large families and lots of possessions and become captains of industry, no. Survival and reproduction is indeed the name of the game. I also note that we are currently surviving and reproducing ourselves straight to oblivion and catastrophe so, Houston - we have a problem. So it's not so surprising that we evolved to reject such ideas but this leads to a terrible doubt: can we trust ourselves to do science? While the exact and human sciences remain at loggerheads I would say no. Science is forever a blunt instrument because it wants to say there are places where science cannot go. So, the Aristotelian universe seems to run out of steam at a certain point and leaves the important stuff about the human soul to madmen, criminals, charlatans and the merely credulous. K -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics?
On 19 Jan 2015, at 22:13, meekerdb wrote: On 1/19/2015 10:40 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 6:36 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 18 Jan 2015, at 20:42, meekerdb wrote: On 1/18/2015 6:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: With the definition you gave in a preceding post, and with which I agree, everyone believe in some God. The question is always: which one? And where it does come from, and why. All philosophers and most scientists have some idea about what is fundamental reality - but (unless they are theologians) they recognize it is just a working hypothesis. I'd say most people don't even think about it enough to have a definite opinion. Well, it might be about time. Many people don't think to this, because we abandonned the subject to professional brainwashers since a long time. Most people are just not interested in fundamental science. Usually people like to take things for granted, and dislike doubting everything, as Descartes knew already we have to do if we search truth. The more I think about it, the more I doubt that these subjects were simply abandoned in an innocent fashion. The problem is that beliefs about fundamental reality are at the foundations of political power, and the powerful know this, even if only intuitively. Of course, religion was invented as a socializing tool. God watched everybody before Big Brother had the techology. God answered all questions and defined right and wrong. When atheist politicians say that we must respect the Vatican, they are agreeing on some border of power. ?? What atheist politicians. In the U.S. an admitted atheist couldn't get elected dog-catcher. Atheists are the only group less trusted than Muslims. They are saying, ok we can't have absolute power but we can negotiate peace with the Vatican. The subtlety is that there is now a very powerful religion which has no name but is profoundly materialistic. I think you intuit its existence, and were perhaps a victim of it, by the suppression of your thesis. It's the Illuminati? Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett are out to get you? You think so? Only ULB's department of mathematics, Le Monde and Grasset, and Drabbe, Doyen, M. Meyer, and others, but it is always unclear if they are victims of liars, or liars themselves. They are not serious, and they does not do their job. That can be proved. ULB is based on free-thinking, and most atheists there were agnostic type of atheists, who encouraged me to work on that subject, and to use the term theology etc. and were disgusted as much as myself when they discovered that there was a bunch of influent (nobody knows how, and why) strong atheists for which free-thinking is only destructive critics of all religion (except theirs). Strong-atheism (non agnostic atheism) is the worst of all religion, because it pretends that it is not a religion, and some seems even sincere (but they were those against computers, AI, consciousness, even the idea that there was an interpretation problem for QM was a crackpot things for them. Logic was also classified as Pure Mathematics, and for some of them, even the idea of applying logic to computer science was a sacrilege. A muslim colleagues of mine at ULB told me that I should have been a member of the muslim brotherhood, if I really wanted to be listened at ULB. He was at that time angry that the fanatics muslims were more listened to than the educated muslims who were trying to attract the attention on the integrism of all those invited in Mosques and universities. They were treated as racist! To be sure, it took me some time to understand them myself, and it is only recently (thanks to the egyptian courage) that I understood that the muslim brotherhood is basically a nazi party (by which I mean a party proving the elimination of jews and homosexuals and any marginals, actually even all christians if you read the chart of some of their subgroups). I have no problem at all with the agnostic atheists, but the strong atheists are problematical, as they forbid, like some fundamentalist christians, and like some fundamentalist muslims, the doubt between Aristotle's and Plato's conception of reality. The debate God/Not-God seems to me almost like a subterfuge to hide that doubt, that is, the question: is the physical universe the reality? or is the physical universe a symptom of a deeper, perhaps simpler, reality, (like computationalism suggests (to say the least)). The prohibition of question is the symptom of tyranny. Academy is like democracy: the worst system except for all the others. They can get sick, like any living organism. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to dialectics?
On 19 Jan 2015, at 23:48, 'Roger' via Everything List wrote: Roger: Even if no mind has yet conceived the the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point of pi, the pi proposition and therefore the process of calculating its 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point and being confident that if you do the process that that number is either 0-9 are all located inside the mind/head. My view is that whenever we talk about something existing, we have to specify where and when it exists, that is, in what context or domain it exists. A thing can exist in one place and not another. A ball can exist outside the head, and a mental construct labeled the concept of a ball can exist inside the head. If a ball can exist outside the mind/head, why can't the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point of pi exist outside the mind/head? What property must a thing have to have an independent existence outside of any mind? (according to your theory?) Jason So, if the pi process were carried out inside the mind/head long enough to figure out the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point, that mental construct for that number (which would be 0-9) would exist inside the mind/head but not outside the mind/head. So, the mind is able to reify things (like the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point of pi) so that they exist but so that they only exist inside the mind/ head and not outside the mind/head. Roger: Just because things can exist outside the mind/head doesn't mean that a specific thing does occur outside the mind/head. If the pi proposition and the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point of pi can be shown outside the mind/head or any experimental evidence for the existence of the pi proposition or the 10^(10^(10^100))th decimal point of pi existing outside the mind/head, I'd be happy to accept it. I can see that a circle can exist outside the head, but I don't see anywhere outside the mind/head, the proposition that if you divide the circle's circumference by its diameter you get pi. But that proposition is not in the head of anybody. A body can get a representation of that proposition in some language (be it LISP or neural nets, or numbers): that is usually called a sentence, and *that* is in the head of the machine or the number. The proposition itself is what is intended by the sentence and the universal machine in presence. That pi is what you find by dividing the circle's circumference by the diameter is (true by definition), and that the sum of the inverse of all squared natural number is true, by a proposition proved by Euler. That is true. period. It was true before Euler proved it, and after, although this is only a metaphor. The number are just not concept to which time or space attribute can apply. There is no number, nor proposition, in a brain. You might find representations of number, and of propositions in the brain, but it makes no sense to say that a number is in a brain, or on the planet mars. Then a brain itself can be described as the representation of a universal numbers with respect to some other universal numbers. If you accept Church-Turing thesis, all computations exists in the elementary arithmetical reality, and in a very special redundant way, and we are there, and we must explain why the white rabbits are so rare and why the rabbit hole is so deep. The quantum almost solves that problem, but to solve the mind-body problem, we must justify why only the quantum works. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The Weakness of Panpsychism?
On 1/20/2015 4:25 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 20 January 2015 at 05:42, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: What would that mean? If neuroscientists of the future develop brain monitoring instrumentation and software such that they scan watch processes in your brain and then say correctly, You were seeing red and it reminded you of a dress your late grandmother wore and made you sad. would you accept that as entirely observable? Well, I would of course accept that what had been observed was entirely observable! It would mean that the public component of the public-private 'entanglement' - the pattern of neurological activity correlated with specific conscious states - had indeed been brought under observation. But I wouldn't thereby be forced to accept that the neuroscientists had direct access to my private state of mind in the same sense as I do myself. The relevant distinction is that between the result of observation, on the one hand, and the mode of observation, on the other. The latter entails two 'entangled' components, of which only one can be made 'public'. Despite its absence from the public sphere, the private part cannot in fact be disregarded in any consideration of 'observation' since it is an ineliminable component of the observers' own mode of observation! For the very reason that it is necessarily private I think the 'hard' problem will be regarded as solved, as solved as it can be, when one can read off veridical emotions, thoughts, perceptions from brain scans. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
